Re:Earth to Mozilla: Come back home
by scrollaway on Monday April 14, 2014 @05:50AM
(#7585295)
I care a lot (see my other answer below). I've - successfully - pushed for Persona with all of my clients, I sell it as "Sure, I'll do Facebook authentication for you. I'll even add Persona auth for free, your Firefox users will love it!". Clients love free features.
I also push for it very hard in open source projects. This is where the change needs to happen. Wiki software such as mediawiki for example is ubiquitous, if it can be automatically configured to present the user with a Persona option a lot of people won't bother disabling it and will see it as a nice bonus.
And unlike OAuth, Persona can be readily available with zero configuration! It doesn't need API keys, that's the beauty of it!
Unfortunately it isn't solving a problem that people have.
You answered this dilemma in your own message. Websites are using Google, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc... for logging in. This solves a problem for publishers that want extra info on the user without asking (e.g. their email, their avatar) and users that care about privacy are simply siloing logins - e.g. I'm not connecting with Facebook for work related issues and I have a Google and a Twitter and a GitHub account too.
And surely, if it were popular, then Persona would be a good alternative. Unfortunately it has a chicken and egg problem.
> The lack of interest in pushing Persona forward has made me wildly change my stance on Mozilla.
Persona is simply an example of a product failing due to lack of interest and resources are limited - if you care so much, I'm sure they'll let you contribute ;-)
Besides, they aren't done yet.